Is the Telluride Bluegrass Festival the state’s most treasured musical tradition?

When you consider the festival’s legacy and past artist rosters, its location and unsinkable spirit, it’s quite possibly Colorado’s most sacred weekend of music.

The 38th annual festival — Telly, as some call it — starts Thursday with an outstanding lineup that speaks to the event’s draw. Not only do artists fall over themselves to play the event, but fans have also caught the fever. This year’s event sold out in April, faster than it ever has.

Roots-rock heroes the Decemberists, Robert Plant, Emmylou Harris and Mumford & Sons are playing this year, as are bluegrass legends Sam Bush, Bela Fleck and Jerry Douglas. Jam-roots bands Yonder Mountain String Band and Old Crow Medicine Show will be there, as will indie upstarts the Head and the Heart, Abigail Washburn, Trampled by Turtles and Joe Pug.

What about ’90s pop star Sarah McLachlan? Sure, why not?

Telly is a melting pot of acoustic music nestled in a picturesque town known for being a natural amphitheater. And few artists know that better than Fleck, who will be playing his 30th Telluride Bluegrass Festival next weekend.

“I love the place, I love the musicians, I love the audience, and they give me the opportunity to try the new ideas that I have,” Fleck said earlier this week. “I feel like we have all grown up together.”

Fleck has played the festival so many times that he’s an integral part of the loose-knit Telluride House Band, along with fellow veterans Sam Bush (a Telly vet of 37 years), Jerry Douglas (27 years), Edgar Meyer, Bryan Sutton and Stuart Duncan. The house band plays a rager of a set each year to the delight of the festivarians, a consistent weekend highlight.

“(The Telluride House Band set) is one of the few times each year when I get the chance to play bluegrass,” Fleck said. “These guys are my family, and I miss them. This is one way that we get to spend time together.”

Fleck remembers his first few trips to Telluride in the early ’80s — when the festival and his career were still in their infancy.

“In the early days, I was not as well-known, and I could walk around more freely as a spectator,” Fleck said. “Now adays, I have to pace myself on how much I wander around, because I will be talking to people the whole time.”

Now that Fleck is an international star and a banjo ambassador to the world, he has a lot to celebrate. It’s been 20 years since the original Flecktones performed together, but the original group — including Fleck, Victor Wooten, Roy “Future Man” Wooten and long-absent Howard Levy — recently reunited for its latest record, last month’s “Rocket Science,” and the tour that brings the quartet to Telluride.

If “Rocket Science” is an indicator, the group hasn’t lost a step. There’s always been something undeniable about the original quartet’s energy, and it’s all still there, in the compositions, the flow.

“We just played seven shows, and they were simply marvelous,” Fleck said. “By the end, we felt like the new us was really emerging, and we were getting comfortable in our new/old skin. We are all very different players than were in 1992, when Howard left the group.”

It didn’t take them too long to fall back into step, either.

“We pretty quickly were finishing each other’s sentences musically, in the studio,” Fleck said. “In fact, we recorded much faster than we had originally planned to. And this was with us learning the music in the studio from scratch.

“Yet it was a very different feeling from all of the albums we did with (saxophonist) Jeff Coffin. . . . I love what we did with Jeff, and I love what we have done with Howard. Life is very rich.”

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Ricardo Baca is the editor of The Cannabist. After 12 years as The Denver Post's music critic and a couple more as the paper's entertainment editor, he was tapped to become The Post's first ever marijuana editor and create The Cannabist in late-2013. Baca also founded music blog Reverb and co-founded music festival The UMS.

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